Wiki Groups

Some further thoughts about how we use the wiki by establishing personal and project (or enterprise) PmWiki WikiGroups:

Lucas was introducing the idea of a "HOWTO use the Wiki" and I set up a How to Wiki group for this purpose (see link on sidebar) and one of the important steps in the learning process is how to use the Groups feature of Pm Wiki. Every page at the Wiki has a unique Page Name. These Page Names are actually in the form of GroupName/PageName but what is displayed is just the Page Name as a link. So any words in TitleCase in the edit window are displayed as Title Case hyperlinks on the webpage. If you want to link to a page in another SolaRoof Wiki Group you need to use the full name; for example SolaRoof/HomePage (is Home Page) or EcoSphere/EcoSphereConcept (is Eco Sphere Concept) and clicking on the Page Name displayed on the wiki page will jump you to a different Wiki Group.

However, the Start Page of any group is just simply the Group Name, you do not need to use the format GroupName/GroupName] - the Group Name alone in any group will jump you directly to the "StartPage" of that group. I set up a personal group called Sola Roof Guy and this link is effect to jump anyone to my personal group from any other group.

It is important that we have standards for naming pages and for the "full name" of a page. Those of us who wish to create our own personal group should not name pages like this LucasGonzalezLog/HomePage because this Page Name will be displayed in other groups (here for example) as simply Home Page - therefore we need a standard for names that follows this format LucasGonzalezLog/LucasGonzalezLog but because I now see the Log feature as an integral feature of a Personal Website then we do not need the Log mentioned and could simplify to LucasGonzalez/LucasGonzalez - which is to suggest general format of MemberName/MemberName for each Personal Website.

It is also interesting that Sola Roof is name that works across all Wiki Groups. Perhaps we could have unique Sola Roof Groups names, within the Sola Roof Wiki, if we click on that Group name then the hyperlink would automatically take us to the homepage of this Group . For example EcoSphere/Ecosphere would only need to be expressed as simply Eco Sphere to be an active link in any group and the link would work across groups to jump to the Eco Sphere hompage (is now Eco Sphere Project). This is working with Sola Roof now but we are not linked to the homepage of this group as would be best. Perhaps Andres could create some script to do that and the current Sola Roof page can be abandoned. In the meantime I suggest duplicating the Home Page content at Sola Roof page.

Hold the presses! I think that I just discovered that any time a page exists that has this format GroupName/GroupName that it automatically links across all groups by just expressing the GroupName (example Eco Sphere) to that page (which therefore should be the homepage of that Group) and other pages with GroupName/PageName will need the full name to create and active link.

Here is an example of how Sola Roof Groups would work:

Some people could work together on general design of a particular Sola Roof building application by collaborating on developing a section of the main wiki knowledge base (linked from the Sola Roof Apps page) or they could form a DomeGroup/DomeGroup that would create a separate wiki space to develop a specific project by a team (linked from the Sola Roof Projects page) and the general know how can gradually migrate from experience with a Project to a section of the Sola Roof knowledge base. The general Sola Roof knowledge base is the SolaRoof/WikiGroup where we document "best practices" and general know how but other Sola Roof Wiki Groups give us flexibility to support experimental development for planning, implementing and testing our ideas by developmental groups. For futher flexibility we can have individual projects that could be called DomeProjectName/DomeProjectName and therefore multiple projects can receive individual support, attention and development space.

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LucasGonzalez here:

I'm glad Solaroofguy is looking into these things. We may see less confusion at the end of the tunnel (or widespan ;)).

Is there a way to see what groups are there?
Who can create new groups?